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owned the feature rights to the franchise, "wasn't convinced there was enough interest to warrant a major studio-sized movie about Veronica." And then, Thomas had a bold, even crazy idea. "I knew that this question of a Veronica Mars movie was going to be answered one way or the other." -With the support of Warner Bros., on March 12, 2013 Rob Thomas created a Kickstarter campaign with a simple enough proposal: if just 30,000 fans pledged $71 each, they could, nay would, make a Veronica Mars movie. That amount would total just over $2 million (peanuts for a studio-released movie) and would require Thomas, Bell and the rest of the cast and crew to work on the cheap, something Thomas would later admit as being a little naive. Thomas clicked the "Create" button and thought: "This is it. This is our shot and the only one we've got." If they could raise the film's budget via Kickstarter, they could earn the money to shoot the movie while simultaneously proving to Warner Bros. there was indeed an audience for a Veronica Mars film. They had 30 days to reach their goal of $2 million or a Veronica Mars movie would never happened. Eleven hours later, the Veronica Mars Kickstarter campaign had reached over $2.1 million. "It broke my phone," Thomas chuckles, reflecting back on that day with giddiness still in his voice. "We were all just bursting at the seams. 'Can you believe it?!' " Donations came in literally faster than Thomas could process them: "I had downloaded the Kickstarter app and it messaged me every time someone backed the project. So, at a certain point in the day, my phone was just vibrating completely across my desk. I couldn't clear the messages fast enough to view the phone so halfway through the day, I had to plug my phone into the computer and wipe it clean." Thirty days later, the Kickstarter campaign had raised a grand total of $5,702,153, making it the fastest project to reach $1 million and the all-time highest-funded movie-related project, with more backers than any project in Kickstarter history. Perhaps even more rewarding than the $5.7 million the campaign raised was the process. "The cool part of Kickstarter is feeling a part of something, feeling a part of a project," Thomas says of the 90,000-plus backers. "You're a part of an amazing community of fans and that's the fun part of it." -As tenacious as its lead character, Veronica Mars lives on, with the crowdsourced movie world premiering at the 2014 SXSW Film Festival. "Austin is home to me," Thomas says, nervous to bring his movie to the town that first inspired him. "It's a popcorn, fun, rollicking movie. What will a film festival crowd think of it? That will be interesting." And, this shouldn't surprise you, but it's not the last we'll see of Veronica. Thomas has co-written the first in a series of upcoming Veronica Mars novels, whose release will coincide with the theatrical and VOD release of the movie. And, sure, there are even some ideas for a sequel Thomas is kicking around in his head. -The journey of Veronica Mars both on-screen and off was wrought with frustration, anxiety and heartbreak, but always with a hopeful eye on the future. Maybe Veronica said it best herself: "Tragedy blows through your life like a tornado, uprooting everything. Creating chaos. You wait for the dust to settle and then you choose. You can live in the wreckage and pretend it's still the mansion you remember … or you can crawl from the rubble and slowly rebuild." n Veronica Mars will world premiere at SXSW Film 2014 on Saturday, March 8. See sxsw.com/film for details. Official Ground Transportation Provider for Convention Shuttles Music Festivals Golf Tournaments Emergency Services Transportation Management Services | 1-800-437-7629 | www.tms.com SXSWORLD / FEBRUARY 2014 27